Archive for September, 2011

As I’ve talked to and worked with hospitals and their leaders about Kaizen, or continuous improvement, the concepts, mindsets, and methods make sense to people. They understand how Kaizen is different than the outdated and ineffective suggestion box method. A common response is “Mark, that makes sense… but we just don’t have time….” I’d like […]

The 2nd revised edition of my book Lean Hospitals can be pre-ordered from Productivity Press for a 25% discount. The book should be available in early November. Click here for more details on the discount offer. You can also, if prefer, pre-order the book through Amazon. It will be available via Kindle and other ebook […]

Thanks to my friend and fellow author Karen Martin for taking this picture while in Calgary. Even if you don’t wear high heeled shoes, I think you can appreciate the attempt at error proofing. Karen and I both wondered if this modification to the grates was proactive or in response to an incident or injury? […]

Lately, there have been many stories in the news about supermarkets ripping out self-service checkout scanner, stories like this: “Supermarkets start bagging self-serve checkouts.” 10 years ago, the supermarkets saw this technology as a clear cost savings – reducing labor costs. But, some costs increased, including “intentional and accidental theft, including misidentifying produce and baked […]

As I’m reading the new book by Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, I’m reading it with an eye for concepts that can be applied more broadly than traditional startup settings. There’s a segment on page 21 (readable via Google Books) that talks about driving […]

I volunteered to give a presentation last Friday for the North Texas Society for Healthcare Risk Management, where I was able to debut some new material from our upcoming book, Healthcare Kaizen. These continuous improvement methods are a great way for front-line staff and leaders to both identify risks, allowing them to take action to […]

Some people might find this graphic inflammatory, if they are feeling defensive about the state of healthcare and if they feel like they are being blamed personally. The data in this infographic represents the current state, to the best of the ability of researchers to estimate the impact of poor healthcare quality. To improve, we […]

I’ve been reading the book Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly and, while it’s really interesting, I tend to agree with some of the reviews that said there was a lot of repetition of the book’s core concept – that the best way to achieve something is to take the indirect path. The […]

It’s a project that my co-author, Joe Swartz, and I have been working on all year… the manuscript is finally complete and sent (as a big batch!) to our publisher. I’m talking about our upcoming book, “Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements.” It will likely be out in April 2012, but you […]

This is the first Lean article or case study I recall seeing about a German hospital: “JACR: Lean Six Sigma increases MRI productivity.” The article clearly articulates the benefits for patients, staff, and the hospital – University Hospital Giessen and Marburg. The hospital, using “Lean Six Sigma” was able to “double the percentage of patients […]

It’s been nice to see the “lean design” approach taking hold in healthcare the past few years. I think the first book on the subject was a “manifesto” by an architect, David Chambers: Efficient Healthcare – Overcoming Broken Paradigms My good friend Naida Grunden has a new book out next year called Lean-Led Hospital Design: […]

Thanks to Jamie Flinchbaugh for sending this funny video my way. It’s the comedian Louis C.K. in his show “Louie” (or maybe it’s from the earlier “Lucky Louie“). It’s a clip where, after an initial question, his young daughter does nothing but ask “why” maybe a dozen times. The interaction illustrates the point I always […]

As I did on Wednesday, I’m posting a quote that we collected for our upcoming book “Healthcare Kaizen,” but this time it’s a quote from Seth Godin that we couldn’t really work into the text (or haven’t done so yet). The quote (and my lazy blog post): “Every day I meet people who have so […]

Update: I edited the post title to add “Or Does He?” See the CEO’s comment below, suggesting that the TV report gave the wrong impression and that he wasn’t really “undercover” in a sneaky way like the CBS TV show. See also the text from a memo where he announced this program to staff. My […]

As I’m working hard this week to finish, with my co-author Joe Swartz, the manuscript for our upcoming book “Healthcare Kaizen,” I’m not taking much time to blog. But here is the longer version of a quote we are sharing in the book, from Taiichi Ohno, one of the creators of the Toyota Production system. […]

Congrats to Eric Ries as his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses officially goes on sale today. I will post a formal review once I have read the entire book (disclosure: I received a free copy from the publisher). Eric was nice enough to let me […]

The long history of Industrial Engineers helping in healthcare goes back 100 years to one of the “fathers of Industrial Engineering,” Frank Gilbreth — and his wife, Lillian! It was Gilbreth who noticed that surgeons spent more time searching for instruments than they spent working on the patient. Gilbreth suggested a “surgical caddy” who would […]

A guest post from Steven J. Spear on this solemn day. You can also read it here. Friends, Ten years ago, I watched on television as a plane- stolen from the city in which I live-slammed into buildings in the city that is my hometown. I later learned that among the thousands killed were […]